Communications devices which operate under Part 15 of the FCC rules for operation in the 902-928 MHz unlicensed spectrum are required to conform to certain technical rules based on the physical layer protocol being used. For frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) systems, devices must use hopping sequences which have a certain minimum number of channels, and use all channels in the hopping sequence equally. In FHSS-based wireless networks operating in the 902-928 MHz band, such as those utilized in utility automatic meter reading (AMR)/automatic meter infrastructure (AMI) networks, the plurality of nodes located at utility meter and sensor sites have a need to exchange information regarding one another's hopping sequences, packet routing options, statistics of packet routing success, and other network parameters. Given that the environment of utility AMR/AMI networks consists of a large population of low-power devices, the need for network efficiency and memory management is very high.
In FHSS communications systems, a transmitting device needs to know where an intended receiving device is in its hopping sequence in order to transmit data to the receiving device at a given time. One approach for informing the transmitting device of the receiving device's hopping sequence is to store, at each device in a communications network, the hopping sequence tables for all neighboring, or directly connected, devices ahead of time. This approach, however, requires memory be allocated at each device to store the hopping sequence tables of the neighboring devices, which can be significant, depending on the number of neighboring devices. In order to offset the increased memory requirement, this approach might necessitate constraining the overall number of hopping sequences used in the network, which can be disadvantageous (e.g., by making interference between nodes more likely). In another approach, the transmitting device sends a request to the receiving device for the receiving device's hopping sequence table prior to transmitting the data. This approach, however, requires additional network overhead to convey the hopping sequence table between the transmitting and receiving devices prior to the data transfer and also requires the transmitting device to allocate memory to store the receiving node's hopping table.